While writing fantasy stories I can always come up with good ideas and characters but when it comes to making up names that are original and believable I always have problems. This goes for naming people and places. Any advice on coming up with names would be appreciated.
Whatever name you select, be sure to GOOGLE it before becoming attached to it. I've had to change a few names in my manuscript because I've discovered they had unintentional connections to real world places or events that I didn't care to associate them with. For a fantasy millieu name, I like the search engines to come up blank when I google the word.
For my part, I'm writing something with a bit of a Tibetan flavor to it. I have incorporated some Tibetan names I've found, or used some "almost-but-not-quite" names that echo the imagery I'm trying to paint. In short, I've made a lot of my names up.
Posted by wbriggs (Member # 2267) on :
I like decide what language the names come from. It isn't as hard as it sounds. Take a real human language, alter its rules slightly, make up nonsense words. *Not* English. The rules are too lax. But even English doesn't allow some combinations, like these things at the starts of syllables: ng, mt, pn, ts. The language your names resemble will have connotation. Ngomo sounds African; Haleamu makes me think of the Pacific (it sounds Japanese or Hawaiian).
Posted by thexmedic (Member # 2844) on :
Coming up with names kills me. Very occasionally one pops into my head, but normally it's a painful process. The best method I have at the moment is to write down a list of words I want the name to evoke and then pick sounds from those words and mess around with the order until I have something pronouncable and still vaguely reminiscent of words in the original list.
Posted by Lynda (Member # 3574) on :
I have the "Character Naming Sourcebook" from Writer's Digest Books, which is a huge help. My characters are in England and are mortal, magical, fairies, and elves (so far). The mortals and magical people are easy - I just give them relatively normal names but try to find names with meanings that suit them. The fairies and elves are harder (which is what you're dealing with right now). Sometimes I'll take a Gaelic or Celtic name, for instance, and add a beginning or ending to it. Other times, I ask a linguist friend to help me and we come up with something that may have originated in Latin or Greek. On two recent driving trips while I was writing (my hubby drove the whole way), I pulled names from odd places and came up with some good ones. Enya was on the radio and I came up with an elvish name, "Enyanel." A truck went by with three letters on it that I used with a few others to come up with another name (can't think which one that was at the moment). The suggestion to do a search on them is a good one. I came up with what I thought was an original name, "Revenel" and found out it's a real word. *sigh* In such cases, I'll change a couple of letters and try again. It's an ongoing battle. Good luck with it!
Eric James Stone created a Web page: http://randomplots.com/cgi-bin/ngram/ngram.pl ...that uses this method to create names and other words. You can put in your own list of words, or choose from some existing lists.
Here are some results that came back from blending Frisian and German names:
Do you ever see the vanity plates that you can't figure out what the heck the person meant to say? I get a lot of names by playing around with the letters from those vanity plates and other real names.
Posted by Pyre Dynasty (Member # 1947) on :
The advice I got was take a list of olympic athletes from each country and morph them so that people of the same country will have similar names.
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
I used to throw names together and hope for the best...now I try to think of something that sounds right. I also like to reason in this way: (1) I'm (usually) writing science fiction, (2) it's (usually) set in a cosmopolitan culture, and (c) the character names can be just about anything from anywhere in a cosmopolitan culture.
Fantasy is a whole other kettle of fish, namewise. It may be best to take some existing language and morph the names (or names from somewhere else) into something acceptable. That or come up with a language of your own and work from there. (After all, you have to come up with a history of your own for your fantasy---by "fantasy," I'm assuming you mean the Tolkien kind set in an imaginary world.)
****
(Vanity licence plates usually tell me "The driver of the car ahead of me is crazy." Just today my mother and I spotted a plate that said PACINO 1, and we spent a little time wondering if it was Al Pacino driving. (It wasn't.))
Posted by weeboing (Member # 3887) on :
I will use one "just for now" name, such as Jack or Pam, while writing and sooner or later I'll type a different name that fits perfectly.
I do have one problem though... One of the names for a character I've introduced is a name I can't stand... Don't know why... It just rakes my spine... (Sorry too all you Russell's.) I've tried to change it many times, but it keeps on going back to that name. I'm stuck with it... I also do not have an outline... (See my recent fragment post to explain why.) But, weirdly, the guy named Russell may turn out to be a bad guy! This is due to something I've written that seems to foreshadow something.. Weird...
Anyway.. I find the true name will come to me as I am writing... The more you write, the more you find out about the character so the better the name will fit...
But then again, all my names are simple. Angela Richardson, Peter Sanders, Van, Katrina (Kat), Phillip, Russell.. Then there's Lian, Cieno, Kym, and Kole)
My 3 cents... Gotta keep up with inflation.
[This message has been edited by weeboing (edited December 08, 2006).]
Posted by trousercuit (Member # 3235) on :
I can't do that. Once I give a character a name, he's stuck with it forever. It becomes a part of that character's identity that I just can't bring myself to alter. That's one reason I wrote the name generator: all my character names have to be great from the start.
Posted by januson (Member # 4194) on :
for mildly different from realworld names, i add a letter or take a letter away from a common name (eg plete, treven) or steal something off the mormon baby naming database (look it up, it can be quite funny). for something more complicated, like your elvish names or whatnot, i look to the culture i'm trying to evoke and try to come up with something that sounds vaguely like its realworld counterpart, nothing too foreign unless that alien-ness is the point
and, sometimes, a name will come to me and the characters will form from the name more than anything internal to what i thought the story would be
in one case, i was changing an old online comic (as in drawings with words, not as in comedic) story of mine to fit a fantastyworld i've used in some other stories and once i realized the old name for the main character's name was one letter off from the word for "shit" in the ancient language of the world into which i was inserting him, i had my intro, i had my tone, and everything was easygoing. the coincidence in name set me running like no newly madeup name for the character would have
another example before i stop rambling: in that same fantasyworld i had a building i had named malminaret, because i liked the sound of it and because, well, translated in our world, it literally means something like "bad tower." but, purely by chance, as that ancient language was forming, separately from any story that involved this tower actually, it turned out that while mal still meant bad, min meant spirit and aret meant cloud (or more literally, "small air"), which taking into account rules i'd gradually made up/discovered in this language and how its people put together words, was bad-spirit-cloud or stormcloud, which fit as a name for the tower pretty damn well
and i meant for that example to be brief, so i could then mention how similar things happen with characters (since this thread is about character naming), as i have a notion of a name then find in it a rootword from the ancient language of the world and everything makes sense, but i fear i've overstayed my welcome in this post and i must go... for now
Posted by starsin (Member # 4081) on :
I'm know I'm late, but hey...better late than never, right?
In one of my stories, most of my characters are based off of friends of mine so that makes it easier to predict their actions and reactions, etc. So, for their names, I just used nick-names that they (the real people) go by. Like I've got a friend named Grant. Don't ask me how he got it, but he goes by Jay sometimes. So...that's what I named the character I based off of him - Jay. Simplicity.
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
One unfortunate byproduct of my using "real names" for characters is the associations I raised. I have an (unfinished-but-complete) story whose lead character is currently named Daphne---but I keep thinking of Greek legends, and characters from "Frasier" and "Scooby Doo."
This occasionally plays into the works of others. You almost certainly remember that the main character of Tolkien's The Hobbit was named "Bilbo." Not long after that, I read a history of the United States, and one Senator Bilbo came up into it. In that reading, it proved impossible for me not to think of one Bilbo without thinking of the other...and also to wonder if Tolkien derived his name from the senator, who would have been active around the time Tolkien was writing.
